Geology

The boys have been having a lot of fun. We all went to the Hungry Horse for dinner at the weekend. They got balloons and decided to dance to some music that came on. This is them having a great time! 

The weather really perked up this week. I felt like Spring cleaning and Miles was desperate to clean the car so we got out the sponges and soap. He was soaked by the end but between us we did a pretty decent job. 

Then he helped me do the laundry. I love how he is so enthusiastic about house jobs. He loves to join in. 

Caden and Miles turned a box into a monster which they then wore on their heads. It had loads of eyes.

They worked on a poster project this week. This involved cutting out images of sea creatures (and in Miles' case, just cutting out shapes) and sticking them onto a big sheet of paper with UVA glue. 

They went to Harrold Park near Bedford for a play in the sun. This is Miles practising his swinging on the bar. 

Caden found a snail.  He played with it and tried to feed it a banana. We established that they don't like banana but probably ate flowers and leaves. He knew it was a mollusc and we talked about its exoskeleton. He watched it hide in its shell and then reach around looking for things to move about on. 

Miles having fun throwing stones at an owl here. There are some excellent wooden sculptures at this park. They found an eel sculpture that they said was an Icthyosaur. 

They collected a bunch of daisies with long stalks which I made into a daisy 'crown' for Miles. He also wanted a daisy 'sword' (of course) so I tagged a few together for him and he brandished them for a while. 

Miles was interested in some cobwebs under the bench we were sat at. We threw the daisy heads at it and watched how some of them were caught and some tore the web. Then they collected some sticks and we made a web out of sticks. 

We have also been out with their friend Megan. They played together at a local playground which is really great for climbing and is near the River Ouzel. 

We did some excellent bits of work at home this week. We did a creepy crawlies project. Here is Caden reading the captions next to the stickers of insects and bugs etc. He is sticking them in the right places and reading about them to me. We learned new words and especially the word arachnid. 

Miles found stickers and did some sticking of his own at the same time. 

We did a lot of work from their encyclopaedias. We have been using the contents and index pages frequently lately. Caden is getting very used to the purpose of these. We read about molluscs and we read about lots of other animals. Miles really enjoyed his pictures of things that happen on a farm, he liked talking about what was happening in the book and all the different things that were happening on the pages. 

Then I found a spider and caught it in the bug jar. They are usually scared of spiders and initially freaked out a bit but got over it pretty quickly and were then fascinated. They looked at its head and eyes (we couldnt actually see them) counted its legs, looked at where the spinerettes would be and its thorax. The boys both giggled watching it walking around the jar. Caden wanted to know how they had babies, he knew they were  called spiderlings. We talked about the egg sac and how they bind them to doorways and other safe places. He wanted to know how many they had and I didn't know so we googled it and found images of the wolf spider which carries all of its babies on her back, even stopping for the ones that fall off. He learned that spiders lay between 2 and 1000 eggs and we read through all the blurb on the web page about how different spiders operate, even how they eat the males so the males have to be very careful. He was so interested in this. It makes such a big difference to see him learning things he is actually interested in, he is totally engrossed when it is a question he has asked and we find it out. As opposed to me simply trying to give him facts that he has no real interest in. 

We had been talking about life cycles prior to this photo being taken too. About metamorphosis (we have done a few projects on this before). His favourite was the life-cycle of the mammal, (dog in this case). 

Mr Spider!

Miles really giggled at the spider moving about. 

Caden spread his own jam on his rice cake and did a good job!

We got out my World Atlas and started doing a bit of Geology. We talked about plate tectonics again and looked at the fault lines in the atlas. We did an experiment with rice cakes and a bowl of water. We looked at how the rice cakes let the water (representing the magma) through, when they were separated. We also saw how they crumbled when they rubbed against each other and how this might cause an earthquake or cause mountains to form. When the rice cakes got soggy, he wanted to do it again, so we did it twice. 

We also talked about hot smokers, the structure of the Earth and also actually the universe too. 

We talked about the layers of depth in the sea and about pressure and why we cannot visit the bottom of the sea (without a very pressurised and strong structure around us) and why things from the bottom of the sea cannot come up here. The pressure difference means that we would be squashed and the things from the bottom of the sea would explode as they need the pressure of the sea around them to survive. I think we will have to do an experiment to show this at a later date. Any suggestions welcome. 

We also discussed the different layers of the atmosphere and for the first time Caden learned about the international space station. I think we will be looking in the night sky for it soon. You can see it with the naked eye, it's the brightest thing in the sky. 

This is Caden yawning when we did grid referencing. Haha! We didn't do it for too long. It was more of an introduction. I showed him where Milton Keynes was, he wanted to know where Birmingham was and we both found London together. 

We also looked at Egypt and South America. He has a personal interest in both areas. 

We did some art. Caden found he could make interesting patterns by painting squidges on plastic coated paper. 

We made crocodiles out of egg boxes with paint (they are learning to mix their own colours from just the primary colours), googly eyes and teeth from cut out, zig zag paper. 

The finished reptiles!

We had a bit of a look at the globe. We talked about the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Why the equator is hot and the poles are cold. 

Caden is pointing to the equator line here (I am playing a game with him of where is.....)

Here he has found Antarctica. 

I needed to change a fuse on a plug. Miles is always interested in this sort of stuff so he watched while I did it and tried to put the fuse in himself. 

Hugely busy and interesting week. We are planning a bit of down time over the next couple of weeks so I can Spring clean. It's half term anyway so it sort of feels like the right time to do that. We will of course continue home ed work throughout. They never stop learning!